Chess is a game of strategy, often classified as a game of war. The origins of chess have been traced back thousands of years to board games played in ancient Egypt and other parts of the Orient. The game assumed its present physical form in about the eight century A.D. in India, from where, the game diffused to Europe. The current rules for the game of chess are said to have come out of Spain in the latter part of the fifteenth century. Until that time, each country and each region had its own local variation of the game rules. The standardized rules that we know today have completely replaced the local variations of centuries ago.
Since the standardization of chess, many variations of the game have been proposed having different rules or different playing pieces and game boards. One such variation of the game is three-dimensional chess or Schachraumspiel, first described by Dr. Ferdinand Maack in 1908. Since the first introduction of three-dimensional chess, many variations of the game have been developed. Typically these games have had three or four, or even eight, eight by eight chess boards stacked one above the other to create a three-dimensional game board. Different rules and variations of the playing pieces have also been proposed. None of these games have caught up to, or even come close to, the popularity of standard two-dimensional chess. Part of the reason for this is that all of the proposed games have had one or more drawbacks that detract from the fun or excitement of the game. Some of these problems are summed up very well by Mr. R. Wayne Schmittberger on pages 103-104 of his book New Rules for Classic Games (Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992):
"Did you ever buy one of the many different three-dimensional chess games on the market that use three 8.times.8 boards? If you played it, did you find some serious problems, such as being unable to mate a king even when you were three queens ahead? PA1 Commercial three-dimensional chess sets come with many different rules, most of which have one thing in common: they're very bad. They attempt to extend two-dimensional movement into three dimensions without taking into account the differences between plane and solid geometry or the problems humans have visualizing some kinds of three-dimensional moves."
Mr. Schmittberger goes on to propose two variations of three-dimensional chess games for playing on three, eight by eight chess boards arranged to make a three-dimensional game board. While these proposed variations go a long way toward alleviating the problems identified by Mr. Schmittberger, at least in the eyes of this inventor, they do not go far enough.
One of these problems is that with a three by eight by eight board there is just too much territory to cover with the standard sixteen chess pieces. This problem is just compounded by even larger game boards, such as the eight by eight by eight board described by Maack. Some variations have proposed adding more pieces to the game, but this complicates the game and brings it farther away from being a three-dimensional extension of standard chess. Another problem of prior art games is that checkmate is very difficult to achieve because the additional freedom of movement of the pieces has not been compensated by additional capturing power. Both of these problems contribute to the fact that most of the prior art three-dimensional chess games take much longer to play to resolution than a standard chess game. Consequently, the game frequently ends in boredom, rather than checkmate. This is very counterproductive since the original reason for adding a third dimension to the game was to make it more fun and exciting.
Another problem of prior art chess games, including three-dimensional chess, is the first-move advantage that the white pieces have. Statistically, the white pieces in two-dimensional chess have a significant first-move advantage. In tournament play, about sixty percent of chess games played to checkmate are won by the white pieces. In some three-dimensional chess games this advantage may be even more imbalanced. It makes the entire game hardly worth playing when the eventual outcome of the game is decided by drawing lots to see who makes the first move.
Many of the prior art three-dimensional chess games do not successfully extend the chess game into three dimensions. They are still very much planar games that have three separate levels that pieces can move between. Some of this is caused by the three by eight by eight arrangement that allows much more movement in the horizontal planes than in the vertical planes. Another reason is that most of the proposed rules restrict the vertical movement of the pieces so that the play in the vertical planes is not really analogous to standard chess play.